Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Love in Darkness

I was intrigued by an exchange
between host Krista Tippett and her guest, astronomer Natalie Batalha, on last
week’s interview at onbeing.org .Ms.
Batalha likened love—that which connects people—to dark matter.Ms. Tippett responded that yes, love has been
likened to dark energy.

I can find no other reference to
love as either dark matter or energy as love, but I was moved to explore what Batalha
meant as she described evidence that gas and solid matter in solar systems
including ours accounts for less than 5 percent of the matter and energy it
must take to hold planets together and in stable orbit around stars in any
solar system.About 2/3 of the rest must
be dark matter, the other third dark energy.And I ask myself: How does the twin darkness figure in my notion of good
and evil (August 30 post on this blog)—in my notion of the interplay between
what I know as forces of fear and love and their effects on our relations?And how do I account for the difference
between Batalha calling love dark matter, and Tippett calling love dark
energy?

I used to think “we know” that
most of your body and mine is water.Now
I’m told that over 60% of my material self is undetectable.It is the primary stuff I am made of.It maintains bodily integrity, homeostasis that
is, from conception through growth and decay until the body stops regenerating
itself altogether.You and I are mostly
dark, literally invisible matter.It
represents love to Batalha in that it holds us as it holds planetary systems together.
It is literally the most abundant substance of all living creatures.

Like Tippett, I find myself
regarding love as dark energy.Dark
energy manifests itself to us, if at all, as consciousness, which is so real
that we control our behavior by it, yet otherwise so dark as to be jammed by
the electrical noise our most sensitive measuring instruments make.Dark energy flows through our conscious and
unconscious mind in currents, through neural pathways, between two sides of our
brains.The less measurably electrically
active side of the brain is the side of incoming information flow exerting
greater power over our actions.That
side becomes open to incoming information because the other side is drawing
off measurable electrical energy that merely holds onto information.When the right brain lights up, the left
brain is listening to the outside world unconditionally.When the left brain lights up, the right brain
is freed to respond to information from various places inside ourselves.

There must be a whole lot more
information from outside we let redirect our attention and behavior, than information
we knowingly act upon.We humans would
have let fly and exterminated ourselves rather abruptly if the dark energy of
fear consistently overwhelmed the energy of love keeping us alive across
generations.We can’t materially detect
the dark force of love that so dominates our lives.Try as we might, the force of love cannot be
quantified, but we have words for feeling its effects, words of relief from social
entropy or heat, words like harmony, trust and security.We can become conscious of patterns
(archetypes?), in stories/accounts/narratives of how people have connected in
moments of separation.I consider these
to be stories of triumph of love over fear, stories of peacemaking.Whether we connect with others or separate is
essentially a matter of balance of dark forces flowing through and among us.

Darkness normally connotes
separation from life:inferiority (as in
“darkest Africa”), hiddenness or secrecy, dangerousness, death, or at worst,
evil. But light, as in torture and in
the half of the brain that is all lit up, can also connote pain, fear, and
ignorance. Ironically, it is awareness
of the force of darkness that leads me, and apparently most of the people in my
nation, let alone in others, to resist my president’s call to “solve” a problem
of violence in Syria with military action.On this occasion, whether the dark force of love I let control my behavior
prevails over the force that now dominates even my formerly anti-war secretary
of state's current rhetoric--that convictions like mine are “armchair” thinking--remains to be seen.

At the moment, all US news
reports and commentary I hear (democracynow.org excepted) are framed
exclusively on whether my president gets the go-ahead from my congress.They overlook the position President Obama is
about to enter at a G-20 summit hosted by a Russian president who sounds to me
and much of the rest of the world to be a voice of reason.Could it be that so long after the Cold War
supposedly has ended, my pro-Russian view might be taken at un-American?Time will tell…love and peace--hal

About Me

I retired Jan. 2009 from after 33 years on the criminal justice faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington. I continue not to charge for any form of public service, including speaking and consulting, and now have plenty of free time to do so on request. I do not do social networking. I regularly monitor just one email account: pepinsky@indiana.edu; my home phone number is 1-614-885-6341; my skype name is halpep. My papers and such are archived at http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/findingaids/view?brand=general&docId=InU-Ar-VAA9639.xml&doc.view=entire_text.
I am known as a co-founder of "peacemaking criminology." Page proofs of my latest, 2006 U of Ottawa Press book, Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist, are freely available at http://critcrim.org/sites/default/files/Pepinsky_proofs_0.pdf , the end of which lists my publications, nine books and over 80 articles and chapters in all, on a wide range of subjects from the international to the interpersonal level. My preceding book, A Criminologist's Quest for Peace, is also freely available at http://critcrim.org/pepinsky, and a pdf of Myths That Cause Crime is on the critcrim.org home page.